Educational Blogs

Huzza uses blogging as a way to document the year that has been and features class activities and learning that students have done in class. The blog is targetted at an age group of 10-11 yrs old and uses lots of great photos of students to accompany the narrative.

Features:

• Link to other blogs in the same school from different grade levels and classes, "Our blogging friends." This is useful as students and teachers can find out what other classes are doing and also get different ideas on the types of stuff they are blogging about.
• Clustrmap which is a tool that keeps track of who has viewed their blog from around the world.
• Utilising Twitter for announcements about school or class projects and informations.

Mrs Caudill's Classroom Connections is an example of using blogging to monitor students progress through the creation of their individual blogs. Students are encouraged to use blogging as a creative outlet. The blog enables students to write about what inspires them. Although their is some freedom, the teacher has structured the learning by providing topics such as book reviews to keep them on task. The blog is appropriate for 9-10 yr old.

Features:

• The layout is like a notebook which is easy to navigate
• It shows recent post
• It has shortcuts to selected pages such as assignments
• It also has individual blogs on the right side of the webpage in alphabetical order which makes it easy to  find